Resilience
by wilfred the pickle
Summary: If Gideon closes his eyes, it's almost like he's travelled back in time to six months before, the smell of smoke and the sound of screams fresh in his nose and ears. Luckily, he has his team to ground him...if only he could let go of his pride and let them help him. Tag to 1x01, "Extreme Aggressor". Rated T for vague imagery.


**A/N: I'm 99% sure I bastardized canon in this, but what the hell, I tried. See the author's note at the bottom for more notes.**

**Enjoy! **

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If Gideon closes his eyes, he can feel himself slipping back six months to the explosion.

In his daydream, the ground is still trembling faintly with tiny aftershocks, the smell of smoke curdling in his nostrils. Around him, people are screaming, but he can barely hear them over the incessant ringing in his ears. As he slowly comes to and begins the arduous task of picking himself up off the cracked asphalt, bodies and faces begin to swim in his vision, feeling vaguely familiar but all too intangible, like they're simply an illusion. _You're disassociating_, his brain tells him through the rusty haze of shock and denial, and Gideon smiles wryly at his mind's pure inability to shut down its profiling instinct, no matter the situation. A curse Gideon has suffered with for most of his career, and one he assumes will lead to his eventual downfall. He's not an idiot; he knows he's not invincible, _nobody is_, and although he may gamble with his own and other's lives to find a solution he always knows what is at risk. Gideon is a risk-taker, but whether it's a good thing in his line of work, he has yet to answer.

A face floats in front of Gideon's and suddenly crystallizes into full, sharp view; Aaron Hotchner is standing over him, face bruised and bleeding, but alive nonetheless. His mouth moves up and down, open and shut, but Gideon still can't quite manage to make out his words. He sees the hand Hotch has held out for him and takes it wordlessly, climbing to his feet. The other man's words slowly come into focus; words like _fatalities_ and _unsub_ and should have known start to permeate through the fuzz coating Gideon's brain. Hotch himself looks fine, if a little banged up; there's a rather large cut on his forehead he should probably have looked at, and that bruise on his cheek will probably linger for a week or two, but other than that the younger agent looks fine. Gideon watches with detached curiosity as Hotch pulls out a cellphone and begins dialing, then turns away to survey the damage.

The building before them has caught on fire, smoke billowing out of one of the windows and towards the sky. Paramedics and firemen are shouting orders and creating even more chaos, the flashing sirens making the ground light up in red and blue. A few meters away, Gideon can see Reid helping an injured officer stand, looping an arm around his waist. His protégé appears to be fine, other than what looks like a sprained or broken wrist. A moment of panic stabs through him when he realises Morgan, Morgan's not here, but sighs in relief when he remembers that the agent is still in Quantico, stuck filling out paperwork he'd missed out on during a short sabbatical he'd taken. Hotch waves a hand in front of his face and Gideon realises he's been standing there, staring blankly at the building for a good minute or two now, listening to the screams of those trapped inside.

"Gideon?" Hotch says questioningly, glancing behind him and focusing on a crowd of police officers restraining their suspect. Their suspect who was now staring at Gideon victoriously, a smug smirk playing upon his lips. Adrian Bale, the Boston Shrapnel Killer, gazing at Gideon with an eerily calm yet triumphant expression, never once breaking eye contact with the profiler as he was led away and pushed roughly into a police van.

Then somebody knocks on the door to his office and the illusion is shattered as he roughly forces his eyes open.

He glances at the clock on his desk - Gideon estimates he must have spent a good ten minutes reliving the memories of six months ago. He knows from a place deep within his soul that he probably shouldn't be back at work just yet, not with a heavy case of survivor's guilt hanging over him, but evil waits for no man, and Gideon would feel even worse if he simply let the BAU go without his skills for any longer. The knock at the door comes again, slightly stronger. Gideon sighs and tries in vain to check his reflection in the window, making sure he's not too pale. He is, but he'll just have to deal with it.

"Come in," he says, keeping his voice steady and even. _No giveaways, _he thinks with a slightly out-of-place feeling of satisfaction.

Spencer Reid enters, thumbing through a hefty stack of reports and setting them on the edge of Gideon's desk. "I finished my reports, so I'll be going home now, unless you have anything else for me to do…?"

"Hotch sent you in here to check on me." It's not a question.

Reid blushes and looks down at his feet. "Is it that obvious?" he asks sheepishly, taking Gideon's assertion as an invitation to take a seat (which it most certainly was not, Gideon thinks with slight annoyance, but they've all had a rough day and he's not going to feed Reid to the lions, a.k.a a certain Aaron Hotchner).

"I can see Hotch standing in the bullpen. Watching us," Gideon clarifies with a small, thin-lipped smile.

Reid turns his head, rolling his eyes when he sees Hotch is indeed standing in the middle of the bullpen, pretending to fill out paperwork. At Reid's own desk. "You'd think _One-Facial-Expression-Aaron Hotchner _would cover better than that." His face pales. "Please don't tell him I said that."

"You're safe," Gideon chuckles, taking Reid's files and glancing over them briefly. He frowns and scans them in more detail. "Your handwriting has certainly...changed in the three days since I last read a report written by you."

"That would be because I stole some of Morgan's reports to give to you as a ruse." Reid bites his lip. "Don't judge me. I didn't think you would look through them until I'd left your office."

"I guess you thought wrong." Gideon stacks the papers on top of some others lying on his desk, ignoring Reid's wince as he tosses the entire stack haphazardly into a desk drawer. "So tell me," he says, clasping his hands under his chin. "What would Hotch like to hear from me?"

Reid pauses before he answers. "Probably the truth."

"What I gave him before on the plane home was the truth," Gideon sighs irritably.

"So what was that?"

"That I was fine. Perhaps not as fine as I could be, but under the circumstances, I think it's understandable." There is an awkward silence as Reid processes the biting tone Gideon has never used on him before. "How's the wrist?" he offers with a tiny smile.

"Seeing as it was _six whole months ago_, I would say it's pretty much fully healed by now." Reid doesn't look amused. "I'm not some fragile flower needing to be kept wrapped in cotton wool, you know. I can look after myself."

"Neither am I, Reid. I can take care of myself just fine. And you're not either."

"The team doesn't seem to realise that sometimes," Reid huffs, and Gideon smiles inwardly as he realises he's distracted Spencer away from their original topic. Reid has probably noticed, he thinks, but is letting Gideon get away with it. _For now._

"Just checking. It's my job to be concerned." Gideon makes eye contact and is surprised when Reid steadfastly holds it.

"It's Hotch's job to be concerned, too. Let him do his job."

"It's not Hotch's job to be distrusting and stubborn."

"It's not _distrust_, it's worry," Spencer insists, glancing back toward the bullpen. Hotch is still pretending to fill out paperwork, and both Gideon and Reid shake their heads at the depths of their unit chief's desperation. "But perhaps on this one occasion…he really has gone a little too far."

"I'll be okay," Gideon says softly, with a small smile. "Go home, Reid. Both of you. I expect to see you here bright and early tomorrow."

Reid stands and turns toward the door. "If that's the way you want to play it," he shrugs, "then I guess it's your loss."

"Who's giving you a lift home?" Gideon asks, eager to try and get in the doctor's good books again. He'd heard Reid was a master of pranking, and didn't exactly want to be on the receiving end of one.

"Morgan. I'm actually keeping him waiting right now, so…bye." Reid leaves abruptly, and Gideon sees him give Hotch an exaggerated shrug as he walks out. Hotch gives a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head before retreating back to his own office. Gideon knows Reid was probably lying about having a lift home and was just looking for an excuse to leave before things turned into a full-blown argument. The man has grown some backbone since he'd joined the BAU, but he still runs away from confrontation. _Nothing that can't be worked on_, Gideon shrugs. His protégé is still young and learns quickly.

Gideon decides to leave quickly and try avoid Hotch on his way out. It's afternoon outside, the sun shining much too brightly for Gideon's liking. It reminds him too much of the blazing fire, burning the corpses of the people he'd sent in to their deaths. He's seen the aftereffects of trauma on an individual; in his line of work, it's just another part of the job. To Gideon, his own trauma is nothing more than something trivial, a typical component of life that everybody must deal with, and if you don't, you're weak. Something tells Gideon that he shouldn't be this desensitized to other's suffering, his own suffering, but he knows deep down that it's for his own good. If he wasn't so desensitized, he doesn't know how he would cope with the horrors he faced every day. He doesn't know how any of them could. Being completely honest with himself, Gideon is terrified of the day that he stops feeling anything - no horror, no fear, only a simple acceptance of the way of life. No desire to change, to understand. He doesn't want to become numb, like his predecessors. In the BAU, becoming numb is a very real fear.

_I wonder how much longer I'll be able to hold out_, he thinks, climbing into his car as the sun seems to mock him.

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**So, my first Criminal Minds fic ever didn't go too badly, did it? I just finished watching a marathon of CM and felt like I needed to get…something even slightly productive done on my day off. Because writing fan fiction instead of completing homework is productive now.**

**If there are any canonical errors in this, feel free to point it out. I'm not actually entirely sure that Reid was present at Adrian Bale's capture, seeing as he seemed quite new to the team in Tabula Rasa (an episode that Gideon is absent from in the flashbacks, which leads me to believe that it took place during Gideon's six months of leave but then again I don't think that makes sense in the show's canonical timeline because wasn't that case from 2004 and Extreme Aggressor is in 2005 and I don't know the exact dates but _asdfghjkl my brain hurts_), but in my headcanon, he was. I do know for sure that Morgan was absent, but I couldn't remember why and said he was on sabbatical, which isn't really my headcanon but what the hey, it's an excuse.**

**Leave a review if you enjoyed, it makes all the difference to my day. Thank you for reading!**


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